Political Responsibility in Rizal’s El Filibusterismo
- Dr. Paul Dumol
- 4 days ago
- 2 min read
By Dr. Paul Arvisu Dumol
Published in Budhi, 2004.
The invitation I received to be one of the speakers at your Midyear Conference suggested the theme “Philosophy and Political Responsibility” with the hope that this paper I am reading to you now might be of help in preparing for the coming general elections. Resort to philosophy is characteristically a sign that things are deteriorating woefully or getting out of hand. There is in truth a general feeling of hopelessness about our social, political, and economic situation. People look at the coming general elections with a sense of impending doom. What ought we to do? This is a question about our responsibility to put an end to this situation, our “political” responsibility we may say, if we consider that we are concerned about the nation. To answer this question I wish to turn to the philosophy of someone—not precisely because we know him for philosophy, but because he is who he is. I refer to José Rizal.
Rizal, of course, was no philosopher, but he was a great admirer of philosophy. For most of his life (roughly from 1877 to 1890) he believed that philosophy, and the nineteenth-century belief in Progress in particular, provided the key to history. This belief informs the Noli me tángere. In 1891 he suffered a crisis, and philosophy was replaced by theology as the keeper of the key of history. This crisis and its resolution is the subject matter of the Filibusterismo. If Rizal was not a philosopher by training, however, even less was he a theologian: the theology of the Fili, in my opinion, is actually philosophy in disguise. It is a raw philosophy in the Tagalog sense of hilaw. One senses its antecedents—the Scholastics, Aristotle, the Gospels, but it approximates originality in the way that any new development of an old tradition is original. One is tempted to classify it as political philosophy, and yet it is not quite that. Social philosophy then? The barest sketch of social philosophy perhaps, the outline of which, however, is as clear as a line drawing by Picasso. It is this philosophy of the Fili that I am interested in for the purposes of this lecture.
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